Here’s a picture of two parents whose 19 year-old daughter was just murdered by Islamists. This story from the Sydney Morning Herald makes for more gut-wrenching reading:
At 2pm yesterday, Craig Salvatori put his two young daughters on a plane at Bali airport, telling them he had to stay “to look for mummy”. Three hours later he found her body in a morgue. Kathy, who would have turned 38 yesterday, was barely recognisable, except for some jewellery, her body so badly charred, her blonde hair blackened… The president of the Maroubra Lions rugby league club, John Costa, said seven families had immediate members missing. “We look like we’ve lost five mothers, a father and two children … missing this long after the event, it’s not looking good.”
Read the story. This is Australia’s September 11. Meanwhile, we’re told to debate whether we should go to war. This isn’t war? (Found via Tim Blair, who is must-reading right now.)
THE CASE FOR WAR: Thank God (and Marty Peretz, Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt) for the New Republic. No I’m not just sucking up. The maintenance of a robust domestic liberalism with foreign policy toughness and moralism is a public service. I say this as someone who dissents from some of their redistributionist economic policy. In this tradition, Jon Chait – one of the magazine’s most impassioned opponents of George Bush’s domestic agenda – seems to me to have nailed a couple of vital weaknesses in the liberal case against war. First, the notion that this war is somehow uniquely unilateralist or threatening to international law. On the contrary, Chait argues:
The more persuasive justification for war is that Iraq has violated a series of U.N. resolutions requiring its disarmament and compliance with weapons inspections. Yes, lots of countries violate U.N. resolutions. What makes Iraq’s violation a casus belli is that it agreed to disarm as a condition of ending the Gulf war. War with Iraq does not require trashing international law. Just the opposite: Sustaining international law is central to its very rationale.
Put like that, it’s obvious. Besides, do you recall all these internationalists getting uptight about the bombing of Kosovo, done despite no U.N. approval? But Chait’s better point is the way in which Bush’s threat of force has made inspections more rather than less viable:
If forced to choose between tough inspections and nothing, the allies have shown they prefer nothing. If forced to choose between tough inspections and unilateral war, it now looks as though they will choose inspections. Had Bush foresworn unilateral action, as liberals have implored, the prospects for the tough U.N. inspections they now urge would be nonexistent.
I wish Jon hadn’t engaged in some gratuitous Bush-bashing in the piece. But maybe it’s as well he did. He proves that you can be a Bush-hater and still support the war. Would that more liberals had the courage to overlook their dislike of the president and get to the point.
ANTI-WAR MOMENTUM?: What to believe – Evelyn Nieves’ breathless, Rainesian poem to resistance in the Washington Post; or this more sober account from the Chicago Tribune? One obvious point, noticed by Glenn Reynolds, is that the Post piece relies entirely on the anti-war movement’s own assessment of its numbers and strength.
MUST-READ: Alas, it’s not online, but Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on Hezbollah in the current New Yorker is yet another superb piece of reporting from him. It left me with an even grimmer feeling in my stomach than usual: and certainly the expectation that a new war in Lebanon will likely soon follow war on Iraq. I think what Jeffrey has seen with his own eyes – which is what has led him to take a robust pro-war stance – is the emergence of another Nazi-like ideology in the Middle East. Here’s how he puts it in the online interview on the New Yorker site:
[S]omething new is happening in the Arab world-namely, the melding of Arab nationalist-based anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Koran, and, most disturbingly, the antique anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories of European Fascism. Add Holocaust denial, which is also becoming popular in the Arab world, and you have a dangerous new ideology, an ideology that Hezbollah, despite its assertions that it has nothing against Jews as Jews, propounds quite vigorously.
Reading the article, I’m even more convinced that these fanatics interpret any weakness or conciliation on the part of the West as an invitation for more terror. That’s why they have to be defeated. And sooner rather than later.
NEED A SMOKE? Here’s a place where it’s still legal.
The Dish 